WHOAH. Just downloaded the new Catalyst drivers that enable Morphological filtering for the 5xxx series of AMD/ATi cards, and they do funky things to AAD when MLAA is enabled

Thanks for letting me know that the Foobar thing is fixed, I've put up 0.37.1 with that fix included now.

I'm not sure I'll be able to do anything about that MLAA thing, if it's happening at the driver level its beyond my control! I'll have a look around the web, and see if anyone else has any ideas, but it looks to me like MLAA is deciding that part of the AAD window really needs to be aliased. Unless there's some flag I can set to say don't alias this window (which seems unlikely as MLAA appears to be a post-process filter), then it's probably going to stay like that until AMD fix their drivers.

Hi all, one of those 'just got your great app today' posts. Looks really slick, I'm attempting to integrate it with MP3Tag, I've added it as an external tool but I'd like to be able to highlight an album of songs in MP3Tag, hit tools / Album Art Downloader and have it prepopulate the artist/album fields in AAD. It's currently not getting the artist/album with just adding the .exe w/ no command arguments in the tool function of MP3Tag.

Went through 10 or so pages of this 58 page thread and didn't see it and searched. Please reference the post if this has been hashed over already.

I also embedd all my album art into my wma files .. are there plans for allowing highlighting of the album in MP3Tag, kicking off AAD choosing the appropriate art and having an option to embed back in the highlighted albums as 'Front Covers'?

Thanks for your comments, I'm glad you like it. To pass the artist and album fields, use the command line parameters:

/artist "%artist%" /album "%album%"

There's plenty more stuff you can do with command line arguments (example), but those are the most basic ones to use. For all the parameters available, see the Command Line Reference, under the Help menu.

AAD doesn't embed artwork within files, it's just for getting art, not for managing tags. You can kick off AAD to download an image file, but you need some other tag management software to manage embedding it within all the files that belong to the album. MP3 tag can do this quite easily, I think - there's an Import Cover from File action that should do the job.

AAD doesn't embed artwork within files, it's just for getting art, not for managing tags. You can kick off AAD to download an image file, but you need some other tag management software to manage embedding it within all the files that belong to the album. MP3 tag can do this quite easily, I think - there's an Import Cover from File action that should do the job.

Alex, The ability to automatically embed the artwork in song files would be a killer feature for AAD. I realize that this a change in philosophy.... perhaps this could be for V1.5 ?

In the meantime, a temporary solution could be the addition of a custom action launched from AAD? This could be used to call a (yet to find) artwork embedding tool that supports command line...

If you want to add your name to the embedded artwork feature request, there's a tracker for it here. I still don't think it's likely to happen, though.

Custom Actions is more likely to happen than that, it's something I've considered before, and might eventually get round to. It does, however, illustrate one of the major problems with having AAD embed artwork, and that is: how would the purported artwork embedding tool know which files to embed the artwork within? The only information available from AAD is the artist and album name searched for, and the path to the image file. The reason that embedding artwork is a tag-managment problem is that to do it properly you need to know which all the files that an album consists of are, and for that you need proper tag management software. It's the same class of problem as ensuring all your files in an album have the same Album, Genre, Date and Number of Discs tags.

AAD handles obtaining artwork. Tag Management software handles modifying the tags (including image tags) of files. Good Tag Management software should be able to use AAD for the artwork-obtaining step. If I were to write a tag management application myself, I'd certainly have it integrate with AAD, but I currently have no plans to write one.

If you want to add your name to the embedded artwork feature request, there's a tracker for it here. I still don't think it's likely to happen, though.

Custom Actions is more likely to happen than that, it's something I've considered before, and might eventually get round to. It does, however, illustrate one of the major problems with having AAD embed artwork, and that is: how would the purported artwork embedding tool know which files to embed the artwork within? The only information available from AAD is the artist and album name searched for, and the path to the image file. The reason that embedding artwork is a tag-managment problem is that to do it properly you need to know which all the files that an album consists of are, and for that you need proper tag management software. It's the same class of problem as ensuring all your files in an album have the same Album, Genre, Date and Number of Discs tags.

AAD handles obtaining artwork. Tag Management software handles modifying the tags (including image tags) of files. Good Tag Management software should be able to use AAD for the artwork-obtaining step. If I were to write a tag management application myself, I'd certainly have it integrate with AAD, but I currently have no plans to write one.

Alex

Good point, you have the global view of the problem, whereas I am merely attempting to solve my own problem which is a single case figure. I typically launch AAD from the context menu and 100% of the time song files are nicely split into their album folder. This is a very simple scenario.

Integrating from an MP3 tag management software would make sense, but it would still be somewhat complicated to track what cover art to use for which file. Maybe this could be solved if only one album is sent at a time and the resulting file(s) would be applied to all selected tracks. But since AAD would likely send back multiple pictures, with each their own type (cover, back, CD, etc), some kind of manifest would have to be sent back...

When launching the program from the context menu, images are no longer saved under the directory where music file was found.

Could you tell me what you have in the box "Specify path to find images" in the File Browser window? (click the Options link to show it). There was a small fix in the behaviour of paths with ".." in them when file path pattern matching was enabled, but this shouldn't have caused the issue you describe.

Alex

Hey, I found out how the problem occurs:

Use Explorer context menu to search for album art on a single folder

In the album art search window, the target folder is fine

Remove one word from the album name or the artist name (this frequent in order to increase the number of hits)

The path is not carried to the new search window where it defaults to the pictures location

Thanks for the command line params for the tool addition in MP3Tag Alex. Worked a treat.

The art embedding I was suggesting is not as 'full scope' as some of the use cases you're talking about, it would be manual process one album at a time sort of thing.

My use case would be:

1. highlight an album in MP3Tag, choose tool/AAD.2. Choose the best looking cover from the list.3. Press a button on the thumbnail to embed.4. That would embed the image as Front Image into the highlighted songs from step 1.

The end.

It's not so bad now, just copy from AAD results and paste into the art box on MP3Tag and ctrl-s to save all the songs w/ the new image. Laugh. Thanks again -

The path is not carried to the new search window where it defaults to the pictures location

That's intentional, as if it's a new window it assumes that you're searching for a new, different, album (which you would presumably not want saved in the folder of the old album).

To change this behaviour, click the Options link in the search window and uncheck "Open search results in new window". That way, when you modify the search terms, the new search will take place in the same window, and so will be saved to the same folder. If you do want to do a new search for a different album, you will have to open a new window manually (Ctrl+N, or File/New/Search Window) to do so.

@johnhardyiv: Thanks for the tip about Copy/Paste, I'll try and remember to mention that next time someone asks about MP3 tag and image embedding :-) As for your suggested workflow, I think there may be severe technical limitations involved between steps 3 and 4. Perhaps it could be done with some sort of plug-in to MP3 tag, but not, I think, with a generic stand-alone application.

@johnhardyiv: Thanks for the tip about Copy/Paste, I'll try and remember to mention that next time someone asks about MP3 tag and image embedding :-) As for your suggested workflow, I think there may be severe technical limitations involved between steps 3 and 4. Perhaps it could be done with some sort of plug-in to MP3 tag, but not, I think, with a generic stand-alone application.

Alex[/quote]

The other thing I tried to do w/ AAD as a new user w/ a fresh set of eyes was 'drag and drop' the image I wanted from AAD into the art area on MP3Tag. You can do that with a freestanding jpg or png into MP3Tag .. but I imagine your decision to show the preview on mouse button hold may block that.

The other thing I tried to do w/ AAD as a new user w/ a fresh set of eyes was 'drag and drop' the image I wanted from AAD into the art area on MP3Tag. You can do that with a freestanding jpg or png into MP3Tag .. but I imagine your decision to show the preview on mouse button hold may block that.

Actually, AAD can do drag and drop. If you drop it onto an explorer window, it will produce an image file there. As it doesn't actually exist as a file until it's dropped, though, I suspect MP3Tag can't support it. I don't know if there's anything I can do from my end to help, but next time I get some time I'll grab a copy of MP3Tag and find out.

I am getting the following error message when trying to use AAD. I am using AAD own a Win 7 32bit computer. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Album Art Downloader has encountered a fatal error, and has had to close.If you wish to report this error, please include this information, whichhas been written to the file: D:\Program Files\AlbumArtDownloader\errorlog.txt

Hi Alex, enjoying the use of AAD. I have a substantial ~120K .wma song collection all with embedded art. However when I started out I used a lot of *ugh* 150px covers and less than 500px.

With your new file browser is there a way to:1. For speed optimization, limit it to searching perhaps the first song of an album and assume that embedded art size exists for the rest of the album.2. Return hits for art under a certain dimension like <400px for example.

That way I could drag and drop a letters' worth of artists at a time (~4000 songs) into your window and sort of quickly see where I need to replace my art? Cheers -

Is it possible to prioritize sources? I know if I just uncheck one, it'll of course only use that, but what if I don't find anything there - then I want it to move to another source, in that order. Now it just seems to be using some top-to-bottom priority.

Sorry if this has been asked before, but I didn't find anything.

edit: I know about the "search first", but I want more prioritylevels.

Hello all, sorry I haven't replied for so long, but I've been on holiday.

QUOTE (brucegrr @ Nov 15 2010, 21:46)

I am getting the following error message when trying to use AAD

Thanks for reporting this. I'm sorry, but that error message usually means something has gone wrong with the .net 3.5 installation. The only thing that can be done from the AAD end is to clear its settings - the easiest way to do this is to uninstall and reinstall it. This will only help by removing any possible corrupted settings, though, if the root cause that made Windows report incorrect information (negative window dimensions) is still there, it still won't work.

QUOTE (johnhardyiv @ Nov 20 2010, 01:52)

I'm interested to hear how AAD is performing with such a large collection. It's larger than I have available to test with, so I don't have any direct experience of it! AAD already stops searching for images for an album once it finds one, so if the song that it extracts the album info from already has embedded artwork, it won't look any further for any. It will still look at the tags of other songs to see if they belong to a different album, but if they belong to the same one, it won't look further for images.

For your second point, can I suggest clicking the column header to sort by the size, after it finishes searching? Then you can just shift-click to multi select a whole bunch of albums whose size is too small.

QUOTE (Habitats @ Nov 23 2010, 23:35)

Is it possible to prioritize sources? ... I know about the "search first", but I want more prioritylevels.

Sorry, no, there's no more granular control than "search first". It does not use a top to bottom priority - without Search First, all sources are searched simultaneously, and results are collated as they're returned. It will always return results for all selected sources.

Search First adds the ability to make two groups, so that if no results are found in the first, the second is tried - but within each group, all sources are searched simultaneously. There is no way to make further cascading groups, which are only searched if the first two both come up empty. I don't really see the need in complicating it further like that.

Hi all,I haven't used AAD for a while. Now, with the most actual version (at this time 0.37.1.0) the Foobar Browser tells me

"Could not connect to Foobar2000 automation server"

The COM automation server is installed, up and running. Since I haven't used AAD for quite a long time I really am not able to tell what I have done that it doesn't work now. I'm running Win XP SP 3 with .NET 3.5 SP 1 installed and Foobar2000 1.1.1.

Do you have any idea?

/EDIT: Forget it, I reinstalled the COM automation server and it works now.

I have been using AAD for quite some time without any problems. Recently it stopped working. I have tried removing the old installation and reinstalling the latest. I get the following error message whenever I try to start the program. I have not been able to figure out what has changed. Does anyone have any ideas?Thanks

Album Art Downloader has encountered a fatal error, and has had to close.If you wish to report this error, please include this information, whichhas been written to the file: C:\Program Files\AlbumArtDownloader\errorlog.txt

That would be a .NET exception. Try uninstalling and reinstalling the framework.

I have removed and reinstalled .net 3.5, but I am still getting the same error message. Any other ideas? Thanks

When I encounter .Net problems, I uninstall ALL dot net versions, and then reinstall them all again. This has always worked for me, and it seems that these issues come up frequently, especially after an upgrade.

If this doesn't work, Microsoft has a program on the .Net website that will remove every little pease of the programs. They recommend this as a last resort.

When I save covers I want to name them automatically with "front", "back" or "CD" in the name. At moment I use "%artist% - %album% - Cover.%extension%" - is there also a parameter for the type of images, so I don't have to rename them manually?

In the search window the type is displayed under the size of the image, so I think this could be possible.

Edit: Ah, got it by myself.

QUOTE

%type%: This can be one of: "Front", "Back", "Inside", "CD" or "Unknown", depending on the information provided by the online source. It is used to classify the result as a Front Cover, Back Cover, an image of the CD itself, or of the inside booklet or inlay. You can customise the labels used by this placeholder by including them in parenthesis, separated by commas: %type(Unknown,Front,Back,Inside,CD)%. The order must be exactly as shown, but the text to use for each type can be whatever you want.